Unknown - High School Scandals

She was white, swaying on the edge of the tub, her hands clamped on the cold metal, looking colder than the metal itself. “I did this because of what you’re doing to-to all those bitchy little girls. To those children, damn you, those disgusting, awful, snickering little bitches who would do it all day and all night if they had the chance. They’re like beasts, always swinging their tails and making their breasts stick out without bras, and-and-you! You couldn’t wait to copulate with them given the opportunity. You exchanged them for me-when I had already given you my love, my clean love. I-I thought we would be married and have healthy children that could be raised in a fine, intellectual atmosphere But no, you had to betray me and take up with those filthy little bitches! That’s why I helped destroy you, Dallas Bradburn. So you wouldn’t pass your filth along to other trusting, decent women.”

Her voice rose shrilly, and her lips were peeled back from her teeth. Into the hissing void he said, “Selena, I said I was sorry for you. I still am, but it’s the feeling I’d have for a snake with a broken back. You should be put out of your misery.”

He walked from the bathroom, and saw Dee sitting on the divan with her blouse pulled around her hips. She looked small and shaken. He picked up his shorts and put them on, and she whispered, “I-Dallas, I owed Selena a lot. She helped me when-when my mother died, and even got me the job-in the drive-in. I owed her Dallas.”

“Sure,”-he said, found his tee-shirt and pulled it over his head. Selena was working for either Sladermann or Collins. The detective, probably; Collins wouldn’t stand out in an alley waiting for film to be handed out.

She tried again, “Dallas-I-IT was real for me, I swear.

“You like to keep the light on,” he said, and stepped into his pants Putting his back to her appealing nakedness, he sat down on the divan and got his socks, his shoes Selena came from the bath, her composure recovered, icy now, virtue vindicate. “Don’t bother the girl Dallas. She has already sacrificed herself to you. If you persist in harassing her, there’s always a rape charge …”

“Screw you,” he said. “Do you think that film will prove rape? Or a very close and cooperating friendship?” He stood up and took his jacket from the back of a chair. “Dee-I can understand why you felt-you had to go along with your auntie, but I don’t dig the reason. But do you know what the real tragedy is? Not losing my job, because I don’t think I will. The real sorrow is that you opened up, probably for the first time in your life you really put it all up front and fucked the way you wanted to. Wasn’t it different for you Dee? Was it better than it ever was for you before? It was good for me. It was great for me Dee.

So I have to thank you for that much and say goodnight.”

He was at the door when her voice reached out to him. “Dallas! I-I won’t let them hurt you, I swear. Believe me, I won’t let them. And-and it wasn’t phony.

It wasn’t. I did always have a crush on you when I was in school, and I did have a perfect date tonight. And I-oh hell, I’d have laid you even if she didn’t tell me to. It was fine for me too. Honest, it was, because like you said-I let myself go. I was real with it and I made it all the way. For the first time, I made it right on to orgasm.”

He stepped into the hail, and she said more softly, “Don’t you understand Dallas? I came.”

The poor, sweet bitch, he thought. Some of Selena had rubbed off on the girl.

They had set him up for blackmail, they thought He was certain that was what Selena had in mind. No longer however, because the mere threat of exposure would work with Selena. Would she turn the pitiless glare of publicity on her own niece just to strike back at him as the woman scorned? He didn’t think so.

She was making the mistake of putting him into her own frame of reference.

Next day, the school board pulled three books from the school library: Catcher in The Rye, Thirteen Stories, and Listen To The Warm.

While he was still in the principal’s office, waiting for the great man to see him, they appropriated Ulysses, all of Caldwell’s works and discussed how toyanic The Merry Wives of Windsor without killing the rest of Shakespeare’s plays.

Kingston finally refused to grant him an audience, and Dallas went storming down to the library where kids were gathering like storm clouds in the hall.

“Collins-why hurt the kids just to get at me?”

The big man grinned at him, confident now, having licked all the previous wounds and backed up by a file of graphic photos that showed the hippie teacher being a regular hippie.

Dallas gestured helplessly. “Those books? We’re removing them because of their prurient content, and the effect such pornography will have upon the tender minds of our children.”

Dallas gestured helplessly. “Those books? They’ve been acceptable literature for years, and they’re good. Look…”

“No! You look, Bradburn. We say they’re dirty books, and we have the right.

Like we have the right to decide you can’t teach that crud in your class.”

Dallas swallowed hard “Shakespeare, McKuen, Salinger.”

“We have to protect our kids,” Collins said. “Now suppose you get out of here so we can do our jobs. If you don’t like it, file a letter with the principal and he’ll send copies to every member of the school board. That’s due process, isn’t it?” Fuming, Dallas plunged out into the hail, striding blindly somewhere, anywhere. He turned into his classroom through force of habit, and sat behind his desk with his fists clenched. They hit low, the bastards, and he should have expected that finding the chink in his armor, they banged an arrow right through it and caught him right in the guts.

The kids needed those books, but Collins didn’t give a damn about anything but his own swollen ego, and he ran the board. What had Dallas been thinking about a frame of reference? Collins had caught him out of his own, and nailed him for the weakness. He could go crawling to the man and beg for the return of the books, and Collins might make a deal-if he cut his hair and shaved his moustache and resigned, all humble and properly apologetic.

“Mr. Bradburn-please!”

He looked up from the depths of his despair and saw his English class watching him, all in their seats and quietly intent He hadn’t even noticed they were there. “Yes, Kathy-?”

“I said, we’re all with you. If you want us to go out on strike right now, we’ll do it. We’ll shut this school down tight!

Smiling sadly at her, at them all, lie shook his head “For how long, guys?

Easter vacation is three days off. Then the school closes anyway. A lot of pressure can be put on you at home during that time.”

Defiantly, she said, “We’ll wait until we get back then! They’re not going to do this to you-to…”

“To you, is the important thing,” he said. “Those are all good books, wonderful books, and you shouldn’t have them taken away from you at this stage of your education You’re not children now, but young men and women, and you should decide what you like to read, what opens your minds, what helps you to see life through a good writer’s perceptions. That’s what bugs me more than the school board hassling me because of my hair.”

Joey Nottingham stood up beside his chair. “I don’t dig what they’re doing, so I’m cutting out, right here and now.”

Dallas said, “If this was football season, you’d carry some weight; they’d have to listen to you and Eric and the other jocks. You’re not heavy right now, Joey.”

“Then they got us by the-they got us?”